New Surroundings

It's late October, and you know what that means: the next installment of NaNoWriMo is right around the corner! I plan to participate again this year, and I'm torn between two options. I could finally actually write through to the end of The Other Novel, which may in fact be the only way to find out what it's really about. Or I can do what I did last year, and dive into a barely-conceptualized new project; I have an idea about a girl with a mysterious heritage who flies airships. Both are inviting.

It's been a wild few months. Darling Man and I finished out the summer in Berkeley, then came back east and set about the hairy task of finding a place to live in New York. After last year's bleak stint on Long Island, we were determined to move back into the center of the action. DM still has to commute, though, so we focused our search on the charming hamlet of Brooklyn. One illegal sublet, countless realty scams, and two tornadoes later, we have a perfectly nice place to live in oh-so-trendy Park Slope. Call me a yuppie if you want, but it's magnificent to once again live within walking distance of a grocery store, a park, and a library. We tried very hard to rent an apartment with laundry in the building. We didn't quite get that, but we came close: the ground floor of our building is a coin-op laundromat!

Of course another wonderful thing about moving to Brooklyn is that I'm now squarely in the middle of the writing and publishing universe. I've joined an excellent meetup group for Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers, which is already paying off in increased motivation. I'm also looking forward to going through NaNoWriMo with the New York crowd. In contrast to the Long Island region's lackluster attendance, NYC has already had a well-attended meetup, and is planning another one for October 25th. Stoked!!

Writing-wise, I do confess that there's been a bit of a lull on the big projects, but I haven't been entirely unproductive. I wrote a nice little story for the meetup group, which I'll soon be revising based on their comments. I've also started reevaluating The Nymean Corps, and you know what? It's really not that bad. What it primarily suffers from is the obvious problem, given how I wrote it: since I didn't know how the story would end, the plot events aren't lined up in any logical way. Some of the scenes are completely redundant, while others just need to be shuffled into the correct order and have new connecting material built around them. That won't be quick, but it is doable. I've cleaned up the first couple of chapters and submitted them to the writing group for critique at our next meetup. I'll let you know how it goes!